You Do Not Need to Convince Others

The other day somebody asked me how she could help her sister understand all this LOA stuff. This person was tired of being challenged on her beliefs by her sister, and felt that this sister could benefit from truly understanding how the Universe works so that she could concentrate on getting her own life in order and stop interfering in the lives of others.

I laughed.

Because you can’t really help other people understand this stuff, and certainly not from the vibration of being disgruntled and annoyed, anyway.

You can’t force someone to understand

Law of Attraction is the kind of thing that you can’t really understand until you’re ready to understand it. You can’t be pushed or coerced into “getting it” and no amount of lecturing or discussion is going to make a person ready to understand something that they’re just not ready for.

The Master does his job
and then stops.
he understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.
Because he believes in himself,
he doesn’t try to convince others.
Because he is content with himself,
he doesn’t need others’ approval.
Because he accepts himself,
the whole world accepts him.
~Tao Te Ching

All you can really do is continue doing what you’re doing and hope that some of it will rub off on the other person — that seeing what you’re accomplishing and how your own life is changing will inspire them to make some changes of their own. You can’t base your happiness on their approval, you can just be who you are. Just as they do not have creative control over your life, you cannot control theirs, either.

Unwarranted hostility sucks

I get why she wants to help her sister understand. When you make that decision to change your life and start working with concepts like mindfulness, positivity, and Law of Attraction, it can seem a bit overwhelming at first.

Especially when so many of the people that you know or currently have in your life don’t understand. They may even think you’re nuts. When you’re brand new to these fields, you can feel the power and potential for great personal transformation that these ideas encompass, but when the people you spend the most time with dismiss these ideas out of hand, it can be really disheartening and isolating and make you feel like you’re the weird one.

And what’s worse, rather than just rolling their eyes and then just accepting your new found “weirdness”, so many times, you end up on the receiving end of unwarranted hostility from family members and friends, who somehow seem to feel threatened by your new points of view.

When they’re ready, their own teachers will appear

But as I said before, nobody is able to understand these kinds of concepts until they are ready to. It’s a feeling place that everyone has to get to on their own, and you can’t hasten that process for anyone; even the ones that mean the most to you. When they are ready, their own teachers will appear to guide them.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. ~Zen Proverb

So stop talking about it with these people… there is nothing that you can do to explain it to them and make them understand, until they are led to it on their own. And constantly trying to badger them into reading this book or that one or, telling them that if they would just listen to this podcast or whatever, is just going to make them angrier; it’s just going to make them lash out at you more, and it’s just going to make you miserable and confused.

Don’t worry about what others think. Just do your job – live your own life and be content with yourself and what you’re doing. Concentrate on your own path and on building your own dreams. You do not need to convince others about anything – when they are ready, they will find the path themselves.